Dilute in a saucepan five gills of poivrade sauce (No. 522), and four ounces of currant jelly with half a bottleful of Burgundy wine, adding two tablespoonfuls of vinegar and the same quantity of sugar, also the pulp of a lemon; reduce for a few minutes, then strain through a tammy.
A finishing sauce from Ranhofer's Delmonico's kitchen, built on a prepared base rather than from scratch. Nearly all the work is in the poivrade it starts from; what follows here is a sweet-sour adjustment and a reduction.
Sauce venaison belongs to the family of sharp brown sauces that classical French cookery built for game: poivrade as the parent, with grand veneur, chevreuil and this one as its sweetened offspring. The pairing of red currant jelly with venison is long-standing in both French and English practice, the sweetness and acid cutting the iron-heavy richness of the meat. Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York for over thirty years, published The Epicurean in 1894 as a complete record of that kitchen's repertoire, and his numbering system, where each sauce refers back to the one it descends from, reflects how a professional brigade actually worked: a handful of mother sauces made in quantity each morning, then diverted and adjusted at service into dozens of named derivatives. Venison was a regular feature of American restaurant menus in the period, much of it wild-shot and sold commercially, a trade that market-hunting regulations would largely end within a generation of this book's publication.